Many strange new means of transport have been developed in our century, the strangest of them being
perhaps the hovercraft. In 1953, a former electronics engineer in his fifties, Christopher Cockerell
who had turned to boat-building on the Norfolk Borads, suggested an idea on which he had been
working for many years to the British Government and industrial circles. It was the idea of
supporting a craft on a 'pad'. or cushion, of low-pressure air, ringed with a curtain of higher
pressure air. Ever since, people have had difficulty in deciding whether the craft should be ranged
among ships, planed, or land vehicles-for it is something in between a boat and an aircraft. As a
shipbuilder, Cockerell was trying to find solution to the problem of the wave resistance which
wastes a good deal of a surface ship's power and limits its speed. His answer was to lift the
vessel out of the water by making it ride on a cushion of air, no more than one or two feet thick.
This is done by a great number of ring-shaped air jets on the bottom of the craft. It 'flies',
therefore, but it cannot fly higher-its action depends on the surface, water or ground, over which
it rides.
The first test on the Solent in 1959 caused a sensation. The hovercraft travelled first over the
water, then mounted the beach, climbed up the dunes, and dat down on a road. Later it crossed the
Channel, riding smoothly over the waves, which presented no problem.
Since that time, various types of hovercraft have appeared and taken up regular service. The
hovercraft is particularly useful in large areas with poor communications such as Africa or
Australia; it can become a 'flying fruit-bowl'. carrying bananas from the plantations to the port;
giant hovercraft liners could span the Atlantic and the railway of the future may well be the
'hovertrain'. riding on its air cushion over a dingle rail, which it never touched, at speeds
up to 3--m.p.h.-the possibilities appear unlimited.